8 ms·

Show HN: Nodetube – Open-source YouTube alternative with image and audio uploads

151 points by mayeaux 7y ago

hayksaakian 7y ago
The More competition for YouTube the better. The bigger question to answer: How do you appeal to viewers?
- enitihas 7y ago
  The bigger question is how do you plan to foot the bill for serving videos at that scale.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Eikon 7y ago
    Exactly, there's a reason why no one is competing with youtube.
    - tsherr 7y ago
      Would ads that don't track users sell?
      - enitihas 7y ago
        Even if you could sell ads as well as YouTube, you will neither have Google's scale or technological advantages, nor will you be able to survive on the same margin as YouTube. But off course, any YouTube competitor will most likely receive far less from ads than YouTube does (not counting things like facebook video here). If we ever want to have a better YouTube alternative, I think the main question is would people be willing to pay a good amount of money for that service. Personally, I find the YouTube model better. Even though it tracks people, it atleast makes videos freely accessible to everyone. Would something like khan academy or OCW even exist without YouTube?. However, I have observed that as one progress through the social ladder economically, the appetite for a paid but non tracking model grows.
        ghaff 7y ago
        Most individuals have gotten very accustomed to largely not paying (directly) for hosted content/email/etc. This isn't universal. There are relatively niche sites that people pay to use, or at least have paid tiers. But free is what most people expect. (Look at all the outrage when SmugMug eliminated the 1TB free limit that Yahoo put on Flickr.)
        mayeaux 7y ago
        My take is you go the freemium model. Free version of NodeTube gets you cool features, but if you want really epic features (livestreaming, increased file uploads, private/unlisted uploads) then you have to pay a bit. My bet is that people will get behind the project and pay a bit of extra money on a freemium model to access the extra features and support the NodeTube instance.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    If everyone downloads once and serves twice, then you can reach every human in about 30 iterations. If you want to prevent client storage because you want to create a repeated controllable attention resource, then you will have a scaling problem. (It's too bad you can distribute everything as a torrent and give people an easy way to pay for the movie they just downloaded, even if it was just "on their honor".)
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Getting 1 video to a billion people is dead simple, getting a million videos to 1,000 people is damn hard. YouTube serves both ends of the spectrum.
      - mayeaux 7y ago
        Really good points raised here guys. Here's my take on each point raised: 1) Appeal to viewers: it's slick, no clutter, really fun, and people hate YouTube. There's lots of appeal already just based on the reaction I've gotten posting it around a bit. 2) NodeTube has built in integration with Stripe where you can offer a 'plus' version of the site for $5/month. $5/month gets a LOT of hosting bang for your buck, so the bet is that your Plus subscriptions will outpace your hosting costs, I feel quite confident in that. 3) Regarding a video that may sit on the platform for a long time with zero views, my suggestion would be in that case since the file is serving the purposes more of being backed up rather than serving as content that you would prompt the user to pay a fee for using NodeTube as a 'backup service'. It seems harsh but if profitability is important to the project then you would remove those uploads that satisfy a condition that basically marks them as 'totally inactive, only using the platform as a content backup'. Interested to hear your guys thoughts on this concept. Thanks guys!
        detaro 7y ago
        > people hate YouTube. Do they? In my bubble, that's certainly a very uncommon sentiment from the consumer side.
- tastyfreeze 7y ago
  That is the wrong question. Content draws viewers. So, the question is how do you draw quality content creators?
  - mayeaux 7y ago
    Honestly, I think a lot of creators are fed up with YouTube. Also creators like variety and the opportunity to leverage new platforms. I think new creators will really like the platform, also there is already automatic YT->NT backup functionality built into the app (as a Plus feature if I'm not mistaken)
  - CM30 7y ago
    Well, quite a few YouTube creators I know of seem to be willing to try new video hosting platforms, and have signed up for quite a few of the existing alternatives. So there's definitely interest there. The real question is how you'll get a criticial mass of quality content creators, since while 10/100/1000/whatever could be persuaded to sign up to a new platform pretty easily, YouTube has tens or hundreds of thousands of great content creators on it. Also how to get them to prioritise the new platform over the old one, since many use these new platforma as a secondary one right now, not their first port of call for new content.
    - tastyfreeze 7y ago
      The biggest complaint I hear from popular YouTubers is that it is getting increasingly difficult to monetize their content. An easy way for content creators to monetize in whatever way they wish would be a huge draw. Most of the content creators I follow have turned to Patreon to reduce reliance on staying in Google's monetized good graces. It's not an easy problem to solve. Viewers hate ads but also want "free" content. Making it possible for creators to monetize through ads, micropayments, or sponsorship is only part of the solution.
      - mayeaux 7y ago
        The ideal thing would be a way where you can load 'credits' onto your app and then reward them to creators, very similar to Sparks/Subs on Twitch. If you can get that into a media hosting platform you're golden.
summitsummit 7y ago
fyi: seconds after deploying this, my heroku account that I haven't used in a year randomly got suspended with no details.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Perhaps it's because you haven't used it and their system suspects someone stole your details and wants to run a Bitcoin miner or something?
- mayeaux 7y ago
  That is so bizarre, there is an old Coinhive implementation that I was testing out but it is totally commented out, I just sent a message to Heroku support I will get back to you super sorry to hear that that happened. That's crazy that Heroku is that strong-armed about this if that is the case, will let you know what I hear back.
anon9001 7y ago
It can't federate with peertube yet, but there's an issue open for it with the author's support: https://github.com/mayeaux/nodetube/issues/32 https://github.com/mayeaux/nodetube/issues/32 I think there's a good case to be made for multiple federated clients and servers to ensure the health of the ecosystem.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Absolutely, since ActivityPub is becoming a W3C standard it makes sense for as many social sites as possible to support it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chmod775 7y ago
> Deploy to Heroku They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform. I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.
- js4ever 7y ago
  Hetzner have true unlimited bandwidth on their dedicated servers :)
  - kirstenbirgit 7y ago
    Nothing is unlimited.
    - arghwhat 7y ago
      Yeah, "unrestricted" is a better term here.
    - hydgv 7y ago
      If something is not unlimited in theory, but it is unlimited in practice, then it is unlimited.
      - mayeaux 7y ago
        The amount of electricity on Earth is not unlimited so at the end of the day there is a literal limit to the amount of data that can be transferred but for the purposes of advertising the product it's fair to describe the bandwidth as unlimited since what we're trying to do is inform the customer so they can make a purchasing decision :)
    - fyp 7y ago
      In theory if you can completely saturate the 1 gbit link for a whole month it's 300TB/month
lidHanteyk 7y ago
What's privacy like? One of the big problems with Peertube is that participating peers can gather information on what you watch. Is Nodetube any better? Ideally, I would not need to let anybody else know which videos I'm watching.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Personally I would never implement WebTorrent on production because of that exact issue. If you wanted to have it turned off by default and then have a user opt-in that would be one thing but I would never have it on by default. NodeTube doesn't share your IP publicly it just serves videos from the server itself. Thanks for your input!
whatsmyusername 7y ago
You're using backblaze as a storage medium? ex: https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/fred12/anthony/PgIOufN.mp4 https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/fred12/anthony/PgIOufN.mp4
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Backblaze B2 is generic cloud storage, not the typical backup stuff they are known for.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  NodeTube has a really nice BackBlaze integration so I'm just using it for the purposes of this demo app atm. Even with the high traffic the site is experiencing right now it's incredibly inexpensive to use B2.
anderspitman 7y ago
The main advantage that keeps people using YouTube seems to be discoverability (and of course momentum). Would it be feasible to make a search engine that aggregates across YouTube and some of these alternatives to facilitate gradual transitioning, or are there technical/policy limitations to doing that?
- jakear 7y ago
  Bing Videos already does something similar, where video results from a bunch of different sources are presented in their player, so you can get away with not actually knowing where your video is hosted.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  The goal here is to get enough of an OS community behind NodeTube that there are a lot of different sized instances out in the wild. At that point with ActivityPub the idea is to federate them and allow servers to index eachother's content, that's the vision at the moment.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  I'm involved with some large youtube channels and wanted to comment on why Youtube works for content creators. There's 3 reasons why they like Youtube: 1. easy-to-use (free, no administration) 2. discoverability, though large channels already have a built-in audience that is self-viral! 3. monetization, typically $1k - $5k/million views/month (eligible above 10,000 subscribers for acceptable content) The downsides are: 1. "copyrights", which are mostly Youtube takedowns (seldom DMCA) 2. the sporadic nature of payments. You might get $0 next month, or $1000. Very mysterious, so creators rely on Patreon to pay their rent. 3. Occasionally your comments get disabled, related to "copyrights." Then you have to manually re-enable, which is a hassle for hundreds of videos. Oh, and your account could be deactivated at any time. :)
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Also "demonetization" on the downsides.
  - 7y ago
ALittleLight 7y ago
Can you tell me if I'm understanding this right? Some people deploy their own Node Tube instances. Each instance has users (creators and viewers) and content (videos, images, comments, etc). If so, how are NT instances joined together? How does discovery happen? Are users shared between instances? Do you have an about or summary page that answers these and other questions? Really excited and glad to see YouTube competitors. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Plus, I watched a video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair and it worked perfectly.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Currently NT instances are not joined together but that is a planned feature using the Fediverse and ActivityPub. Probably the best place to find info is the Github if you scroll down to features, or to ask me in the Discord (also linked on Github). The Readme is super incomplete missing a lot of information on a lot of features but I'll probably have a chance to take care of that tomorrow. Thanks for the interest and yeah that's a classic Bill Gates video had to upload it ;)
bavell 7y ago
I love the idea and have been wanting a good OSS YT alternative for some time now. My initial impression from looking at the code and browsing the demo site is that this project is very much in it's infancy and has a long way to go before I'd consider running it in production as an admin or frequenting the site as a viewer. E.g. code smell, poor comment functionality, UX issues, minimal documentation and examples... Something I think would help bring in contributors is an architectural diagram and/or blog post on how the subsystems fit together. Best of luck to all involved, it won't be easy but it's certainly a worthy goal!
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Hi bavell thanks for the feedback. The codebase itself is pretty robust in my opinion but the documentation it sparse at the moment, it's still very much in its infancy as an OS project, I mean a bunch of really cool features that are built in are not even mentioned at the moment because I haven't had time to get to it yet. So hopefully we can get that documentation to a point where developers feel happy to fork and join in the development, that is the big goal, but thanks for your feedback!
  - bavell 7y ago
    I'm looking forward to seeing the project's progress!
katzgrau 7y ago
I think the image and audio uploads are a good first attempt at differentiation, although it does open you up to competition from two other specialized giants (imgur, soundcloud), so now you've got a war on 3 fronts. I'd instead focus on differentiation specific to video uploads to attract a niche of YouTube users. YT is over 10 years old, so they've covered some major ground and solved many infrastructure problems that you haven't. They also have distribution via apps on pretty much every smart device. Between Vimeo and YT, video hosting is arguably a solved problem unless you can find a hard to replicate feature that they can't and is important to a niche of users. Best of luck, but seriously consider whether you're passionate enough about this project that you will put in the effort to grow it to a point where you've found that niche and users are supporting it in some way to the point where it sufficiently covers your costs and time.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  The response I've gotten to this project has been incredible, it just needs to get in front of enough eyes where the OS community behind it grows a bit and we get several instances up. The code is bomb, it will go viral with some eyeballs, I have no doubt about. Thanks for the warning but I know a deadend project when I see one and this isn't it lol. NodeTube also has monetization, livestreaming, lots of epic stuff. Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
  - katzgrau 7y ago
    > it will go viral with some eyeballs... Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion. I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
    - mayeaux 7y ago
      Yeah this is still a side project for me, I would only move to work on it full-time if it was already profitable/generating enough value for me that it would make sense. But I don't see myself giving this project up anytime soon I love it as a project too much and the world needs it. But thanks for the sober analysis I'll definitely take it to mind.
AnnoyingSwede 7y ago
Cool to see a youtube alternative. Registered and became the 60th user, however it seems a bit slashdotted already with upload of my first video hanging at 99%, "About" link gives internal error, profile picture not being able to upload. Like the initiative however, keep it coming and hope https://nodetube.live/ https://nodetube.live/ will stay around, however understand if you will need ads to make it work financially soon.
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Thanks for the support! If you hop in the Discord I can take a look at some of those things with you, the profile pics not working is a known bug with the B2 implementation, meant to get it done yesterday but the site's been going pretty viral so have been mostly dealing with that. Here's the Discord link if you're interested thanks for the feedback! https://discord.gg/ejGah8H https://discord.gg/ejGah8H
tyzerdak 7y ago
How to del upload?
gbraad 7y ago
How is this different from PeerTube?

151 points by mayeaux 7y ago

hayksaakian 7y ago

The More competition for YouTube the better. The bigger question to answer: How do you appeal to viewers?

enitihas 7y ago
The bigger question is how do you plan to foot the bill for serving videos at that scale.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Eikon 7y ago
  Exactly, there's a reason why no one is competing with youtube.
  - tsherr 7y ago
    Would ads that don't track users sell?
    - enitihas 7y ago
      Even if you could sell ads as well as YouTube, you will neither have Google's scale or technological advantages, nor will you be able to survive on the same margin as YouTube. But off course, any YouTube competitor will most likely receive far less from ads than YouTube does (not counting things like facebook video here). If we ever want to have a better YouTube alternative, I think the main question is would people be willing to pay a good amount of money for that service. Personally, I find the YouTube model better. Even though it tracks people, it atleast makes videos freely accessible to everyone. Would something like khan academy or OCW even exist without YouTube?. However, I have observed that as one progress through the social ladder economically, the appetite for a paid but non tracking model grows.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        Most individuals have gotten very accustomed to largely not paying (directly) for hosted content/email/etc. This isn't universal. There are relatively niche sites that people pay to use, or at least have paid tiers. But free is what most people expect. (Look at all the outrage when SmugMug eliminated the 1TB free limit that Yahoo put on Flickr.)
        mayeaux 7y ago
        My take is you go the freemium model. Free version of NodeTube gets you cool features, but if you want really epic features (livestreaming, increased file uploads, private/unlisted uploads) then you have to pay a bit. My bet is that people will get behind the project and pay a bit of extra money on a freemium model to access the extra features and support the NodeTube instance.
- javajosh 7y ago
  If everyone downloads once and serves twice, then you can reach every human in about 30 iterations. If you want to prevent client storage because you want to create a repeated controllable attention resource, then you will have a scaling problem. (It's too bad you can distribute everything as a torrent and give people an easy way to pay for the movie they just downloaded, even if it was just "on their honor".)
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Getting 1 video to a billion people is dead simple, getting a million videos to 1,000 people is damn hard. YouTube serves both ends of the spectrum.
    - mayeaux 7y ago
      Really good points raised here guys. Here's my take on each point raised: 1) Appeal to viewers: it's slick, no clutter, really fun, and people hate YouTube. There's lots of appeal already just based on the reaction I've gotten posting it around a bit. 2) NodeTube has built in integration with Stripe where you can offer a 'plus' version of the site for $5/month. $5/month gets a LOT of hosting bang for your buck, so the bet is that your Plus subscriptions will outpace your hosting costs, I feel quite confident in that. 3) Regarding a video that may sit on the platform for a long time with zero views, my suggestion would be in that case since the file is serving the purposes more of being backed up rather than serving as content that you would prompt the user to pay a fee for using NodeTube as a 'backup service'. It seems harsh but if profitability is important to the project then you would remove those uploads that satisfy a condition that basically marks them as 'totally inactive, only using the platform as a content backup'. Interested to hear your guys thoughts on this concept. Thanks guys!
      - detaro 7y ago
        > people hate YouTube. Do they? In my bubble, that's certainly a very uncommon sentiment from the consumer side.
tastyfreeze 7y ago
That is the wrong question. Content draws viewers. So, the question is how do you draw quality content creators?
- mayeaux 7y ago
  Honestly, I think a lot of creators are fed up with YouTube. Also creators like variety and the opportunity to leverage new platforms. I think new creators will really like the platform, also there is already automatic YT->NT backup functionality built into the app (as a Plus feature if I'm not mistaken)
- CM30 7y ago
  Well, quite a few YouTube creators I know of seem to be willing to try new video hosting platforms, and have signed up for quite a few of the existing alternatives. So there's definitely interest there. The real question is how you'll get a criticial mass of quality content creators, since while 10/100/1000/whatever could be persuaded to sign up to a new platform pretty easily, YouTube has tens or hundreds of thousands of great content creators on it. Also how to get them to prioritise the new platform over the old one, since many use these new platforma as a secondary one right now, not their first port of call for new content.
  - tastyfreeze 7y ago
    The biggest complaint I hear from popular YouTubers is that it is getting increasingly difficult to monetize their content. An easy way for content creators to monetize in whatever way they wish would be a huge draw. Most of the content creators I follow have turned to Patreon to reduce reliance on staying in Google's monetized good graces. It's not an easy problem to solve. Viewers hate ads but also want "free" content. Making it possible for creators to monetize through ads, micropayments, or sponsorship is only part of the solution.
    - mayeaux 7y ago
      The ideal thing would be a way where you can load 'credits' onto your app and then reward them to creators, very similar to Sparks/Subs on Twitch. If you can get that into a media hosting platform you're golden.

summitsummit 7y ago

fyi: seconds after deploying this, my heroku account that I haven't used in a year randomly got suspended with no details.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Perhaps it's because you haven't used it and their system suspects someone stole your details and wants to run a Bitcoin miner or something?
mayeaux 7y ago
That is so bizarre, there is an old Coinhive implementation that I was testing out but it is totally commented out, I just sent a message to Heroku support I will get back to you super sorry to hear that that happened. That's crazy that Heroku is that strong-armed about this if that is the case, will let you know what I hear back.

anon9001 7y ago

It can't federate with peertube yet, but there's an issue open for it with the author's support: https://github.com/mayeaux/nodetube/issues/32 https://github.com/mayeaux/nodetube/issues/32 I think there's a good case to be made for multiple federated clients and servers to ensure the health of the ecosystem.

mayeaux 7y ago
Absolutely, since ActivityPub is becoming a W3C standard it makes sense for as many social sites as possible to support it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chmod775 7y ago

> Deploy to Heroku They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform. I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.

js4ever 7y ago
Hetzner have true unlimited bandwidth on their dedicated servers :)
- kirstenbirgit 7y ago
  Nothing is unlimited.
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    Yeah, "unrestricted" is a better term here.
  - hydgv 7y ago
    If something is not unlimited in theory, but it is unlimited in practice, then it is unlimited.
    - mayeaux 7y ago
      The amount of electricity on Earth is not unlimited so at the end of the day there is a literal limit to the amount of data that can be transferred but for the purposes of advertising the product it's fair to describe the bandwidth as unlimited since what we're trying to do is inform the customer so they can make a purchasing decision :)
  - fyp 7y ago
    In theory if you can completely saturate the 1 gbit link for a whole month it's 300TB/month

lidHanteyk 7y ago

What's privacy like? One of the big problems with Peertube is that participating peers can gather information on what you watch. Is Nodetube any better? Ideally, I would not need to let anybody else know which videos I'm watching.

mayeaux 7y ago
Personally I would never implement WebTorrent on production because of that exact issue. If you wanted to have it turned off by default and then have a user opt-in that would be one thing but I would never have it on by default. NodeTube doesn't share your IP publicly it just serves videos from the server itself. Thanks for your input!

whatsmyusername 7y ago

You're using backblaze as a storage medium? ex: https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/fred12/anthony/PgIOufN.mp4 https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/fred12/anthony/PgIOufN.mp4

zamadatix 7y ago
Backblaze B2 is generic cloud storage, not the typical backup stuff they are known for.
mayeaux 7y ago
NodeTube has a really nice BackBlaze integration so I'm just using it for the purposes of this demo app atm. Even with the high traffic the site is experiencing right now it's incredibly inexpensive to use B2.

anderspitman 7y ago

The main advantage that keeps people using YouTube seems to be discoverability (and of course momentum). Would it be feasible to make a search engine that aggregates across YouTube and some of these alternatives to facilitate gradual transitioning, or are there technical/policy limitations to doing that?

jakear 7y ago
Bing Videos already does something similar, where video results from a bunch of different sources are presented in their player, so you can get away with not actually knowing where your video is hosted.
mayeaux 7y ago
The goal here is to get enough of an OS community behind NodeTube that there are a lot of different sized instances out in the wild. At that point with ActivityPub the idea is to federate them and allow servers to index eachother's content, that's the vision at the moment.
redis_mlc 7y ago
I'm involved with some large youtube channels and wanted to comment on why Youtube works for content creators. There's 3 reasons why they like Youtube: 1. easy-to-use (free, no administration) 2. discoverability, though large channels already have a built-in audience that is self-viral! 3. monetization, typically $1k - $5k/million views/month (eligible above 10,000 subscribers for acceptable content) The downsides are: 1. "copyrights", which are mostly Youtube takedowns (seldom DMCA) 2. the sporadic nature of payments. You might get $0 next month, or $1000. Very mysterious, so creators rely on Patreon to pay their rent. 3. Occasionally your comments get disabled, related to "copyrights." Then you have to manually re-enable, which is a hassle for hundreds of videos. Oh, and your account could be deactivated at any time. :)
- dboreham 7y ago
  Also "demonetization" on the downsides.
- 7y ago

ALittleLight 7y ago

Can you tell me if I'm understanding this right? Some people deploy their own Node Tube instances. Each instance has users (creators and viewers) and content (videos, images, comments, etc). If so, how are NT instances joined together? How does discovery happen? Are users shared between instances? Do you have an about or summary page that answers these and other questions? Really excited and glad to see YouTube competitors. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Plus, I watched a video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair and it worked perfectly.

mayeaux 7y ago
Currently NT instances are not joined together but that is a planned feature using the Fediverse and ActivityPub. Probably the best place to find info is the Github if you scroll down to features, or to ask me in the Discord (also linked on Github). The Readme is super incomplete missing a lot of information on a lot of features but I'll probably have a chance to take care of that tomorrow. Thanks for the interest and yeah that's a classic Bill Gates video had to upload it ;)

bavell 7y ago

I love the idea and have been wanting a good OSS YT alternative for some time now. My initial impression from looking at the code and browsing the demo site is that this project is very much in it's infancy and has a long way to go before I'd consider running it in production as an admin or frequenting the site as a viewer. E.g. code smell, poor comment functionality, UX issues, minimal documentation and examples... Something I think would help bring in contributors is an architectural diagram and/or blog post on how the subsystems fit together. Best of luck to all involved, it won't be easy but it's certainly a worthy goal!

mayeaux 7y ago
Hi bavell thanks for the feedback. The codebase itself is pretty robust in my opinion but the documentation it sparse at the moment, it's still very much in its infancy as an OS project, I mean a bunch of really cool features that are built in are not even mentioned at the moment because I haven't had time to get to it yet. So hopefully we can get that documentation to a point where developers feel happy to fork and join in the development, that is the big goal, but thanks for your feedback!
- bavell 7y ago
  I'm looking forward to seeing the project's progress!

katzgrau 7y ago

I think the image and audio uploads are a good first attempt at differentiation, although it does open you up to competition from two other specialized giants (imgur, soundcloud), so now you've got a war on 3 fronts. I'd instead focus on differentiation specific to video uploads to attract a niche of YouTube users. YT is over 10 years old, so they've covered some major ground and solved many infrastructure problems that you haven't. They also have distribution via apps on pretty much every smart device. Between Vimeo and YT, video hosting is arguably a solved problem unless you can find a hard to replicate feature that they can't and is important to a niche of users. Best of luck, but seriously consider whether you're passionate enough about this project that you will put in the effort to grow it to a point where you've found that niche and users are supporting it in some way to the point where it sufficiently covers your costs and time.

mayeaux 7y ago
The response I've gotten to this project has been incredible, it just needs to get in front of enough eyes where the OS community behind it grows a bit and we get several instances up. The code is bomb, it will go viral with some eyeballs, I have no doubt about. Thanks for the warning but I know a deadend project when I see one and this isn't it lol. NodeTube also has monetization, livestreaming, lots of epic stuff. Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
- katzgrau 7y ago
  > it will go viral with some eyeballs... Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion. I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
  - mayeaux 7y ago
    Yeah this is still a side project for me, I would only move to work on it full-time if it was already profitable/generating enough value for me that it would make sense. But I don't see myself giving this project up anytime soon I love it as a project too much and the world needs it. But thanks for the sober analysis I'll definitely take it to mind.

AnnoyingSwede 7y ago

Cool to see a youtube alternative. Registered and became the 60th user, however it seems a bit slashdotted already with upload of my first video hanging at 99%, "About" link gives internal error, profile picture not being able to upload. Like the initiative however, keep it coming and hope https://nodetube.live/ https://nodetube.live/ will stay around, however understand if you will need ads to make it work financially soon.

mayeaux 7y ago
Thanks for the support! If you hop in the Discord I can take a look at some of those things with you, the profile pics not working is a known bug with the B2 implementation, meant to get it done yesterday but the site's been going pretty viral so have been mostly dealing with that. Here's the Discord link if you're interested thanks for the feedback! https://discord.gg/ejGah8H https://discord.gg/ejGah8H

tyzerdak 7y ago

How to del upload?

gbraad 7y ago

How is this different from PeerTube?